Peter Rice Projects

Soaplab

Soaplab is a set of Web Services providing a programatic access to some applications on remote computers. Because such applications, especially in the scientific environment where Soaplab was born, usually analyze data, Soaplab is often referred to as an Analysis (Web) Service.

Soaplab was developed in the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), within the eScience initiative, as a component of the myGrid project.

Soaplab is both a specification for an Analysis Service (based on other approved specifications, see the Architecture Guide) and its implementation. It is freely available for downloading - but bear in mind that the installation of this Web Service does not give you any analyses - they are not part of the Soaplab. The EBI has Soaplab service running on top of several tens of analyses (most of them coming from EMBOSS, an independent package of high-quality FREE Open Source software for sequence analysis).

myGrid

myGrid is a multi-organisational project funded by the EPSRCC as part of the UK's Reseach Councils e-Science programme and aims to develop the infrastructural middleware necessary for an "e-Biologist's" workbench. The EMBL-EBI's primary role in the myGrid project is to provide access to its bioinformatics archives & analysis tools through Web service technologies

OpenBQS

OpenBQS is a project aiming to provide a freely available implementation of the Bibliographic Query Service (BQS) specification that is being standardised and adopted by the Life Science Research Domain Task Force (LSR) of the Object Management Group (OMG) . The BQS specification defines interfaces that provide the ability to query a bibliographic repository for citations of a variety of document types, and retrieve the citations matching the query criteria.

Candy

When describing and representing domain-specific systems, there is frequently a need for a string type that can only assume a limited set of allowed values, a set however that is allowed to change over time (as values are added or removed) or space (different servers accepting different sets of strings). Such strings are called controlled vocabulary strings (vocabulary strings for brevity). The Candy project is written in Java and allows access to a vocabulary server (a place where one or more controlled vocabularies are available) using either a CORBA connection, or direct access within the process boundary. The CORBA interfaces of Candy comply with an OMG specification defining controlled vocabularies.

EMBRACE Project

The objective of EMBRACE to integrate the major databases and software tools in bioinformatics, using existing methods and emerging Grid service technologies. The integration efforts will be driven by an expanding set of test problems representing key issues for bioinformatics service providers and end-user biologists.